Entertainment

H.G. Wells: The Google Logo Mystery Is Finally Solved

If you've been using Google this month, you've probably noticed a series of strange Google Logos. First, Google had their unexplained phenomenon logo, complete with aliens and cryptic code. The mystery deepened when Google had its crop circle logo just a week ago. What did these logos mean? Was Google trying to tell us something?

Now the mystery is solved. Google revealed today that all of their cryptic logos were in honor of the great H.G. Wells, the famous science fiction author. Today would have been his 143rd birthday.

Each of the logos was actually a clue to the answer of the mystery. Here's Google's revelation of the clues:

"You might have noticed an unexplained set of doodles on the Google homepage and a couple tweets from our official Twitter stream, @google, over the last two weeks. On September 5th, we posted a doodle with the abduction of our second 'o' and a coded tweet from its alien captors: 1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19, which translates into "All your O are belong to us" (a nod to the Japanese video game, Zero Wing)."

...

"While the link from the doodle to a search for "crop circles" didn't provide any more clues, we also tweeted the lat/long coordinates of Horsell Commons, the location of the first alien landing in H.G. Wells 1898 classic, The War of the Worlds. Some of you figured out what we were doing, but we weren't ready to reveal it all just yet."

We actually have known for a while that Google's logo mystery was in honor of the English writer. As Google notes in its blog post, several people cracked the mystery after the second logo.

We're big fans of Mr. Wells's work (I personally read The Time Machine repeatedly), and have no qualms with Google's unique homage to the science fiction pioneer. Perhaps sometime in the future H.G. Wells will suddenly appear in his gold-powered time machine to greet us all.

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